The class assignment was simple.

Take a picture of anything that interests you. Take several shots. Use different angles. Get low to the ground, for example. Or reframe the subject away from the center so that extra space floats to one side or another.

My professor named the side space as negative space. I figured that must have been some official term of sorts. I also figured that he simply meant to give the photo some air. Let it breathe a bit.

I figured that I could do that.

The other instructions struck me a bit. Don’t simply decide, for example, that you are sad, he said, then go take photos of things that make you feel your sadness. Rather, just go be, take some photos, then notice what happens.

Since I didn’t feel sad at that second, I pretty much ignored the first part of the instructions. They seemed irrelevant. I didn’t realize, though, that I also was ignoring the prevenient experience of excitement.

For one, I love taking photos. For two, our classroom was mere feet away from one of my favorite spaces. So the assignment was a bit stacked in my favor for a meaningful time. And I knew it.

But I wasn’t prepared for how much.

I figured I would end up at the lakeshore along the east side of Northwestern University’s campus, on the other side of the lakefill. And I did at least try to follow the instructions and not simply make a B-line for the shore. So I went to my second favorite space. A sign there said it was closed for a private event.

So I snapped a photo of the Allen Center as I strolled by, obviously on my way to the lake, because fond memories percolated about fancy meals inside the center’s lakeview dining room. I snapped a photo of the new Kellogg School of Management building nearby because the shiny building was new to me and it looked cool to me and that was intriguing to me because I typically don’t dig buildings per se. People are my thing.

Still, nothing in life interests me more than milling about any given lakeshore. Especially this shoreline because of the chunks of my life spent study there. Supposedly studying.

So there I was. Shoes off. Bare feet hugging the ground. Then full body laying on the rocks. And I noticed these tiny, smallest of things.

I noticed the stillness in my belly that was oddly different than the roils of anxiety from seasons past. I used to call the anxiety that lived inside my black body The Typhoon. I remembered how Typhoon would rise up so suddenly from so far down that I was stunned a human body could possess such depth. This was before the sounds of a female therapist’s voice saying, “Ms. Hawkins, you have post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Before the feel of the leather couch in her Evanston office that became like a warm blanket and cup of hot tea to me so I could talk about the things that had haunted me.

I used to go to the lake to find a spot along these rocks to find calm, and sometimes peace would abandon me even there. Typhoon never could fully emerge at the lake, his power weakened by soft sounds of blue, rippling waves and sights of sailboats skimming by. Though he tried.

I never got mad at the lake for her inability to thoroughly tame Typhoon, but I did feel disappointed. Mostly, the lake was my friend. But I remember how her horizon looked warily when the waves refused to talk sweet things to me. She sounded angry and exhausted on those days, as if she was tired of me asking her to things I needed to learn how to do for myself. I remember feeling dejected on the way home, empty-handed and unsure of who would win the next round that was sure to come — Typhoon or me.

I hadn’t been to those particular spots on the shoreline in nearly 20 years, though I already knew things would be different. I didn’t know, though, in what ways. I knew the ebbs and flows of my evolution since then, and the different relationship I have now with myself. I wondered, though, how far down a reunion might go with my long-ago friend.

I’m not sure why, but it was startling to notice the depth of new littlest things. The calm of my eyes as they picked a spot to view and simply stay focused there, signifying the absence of my eyes’ proclivity to dart about searching for something else to see, without any clue to what they were looking for. Nor any understandable reason to abandon the previous places where they would land before. I noticed my abdomen’s rising and falling because I was, well, breathing. Calmly, peacefully, regularly breathing. Because there was no reason to do anything else.

Anxiety is a bitch, and Typhoon was her granddaddy. But he lives in a tiny hole somewhere these days, behind boundaries and a decade-crafted mountain of tiny thoughts like “I am amazing.” He wasn’t there that day, the day I had an assignment as a student of pastoral theology, personality, and culture. So I took a photo of his absence.